Q&A: The Principle of Equality
The Principle of Equality
Question
We’ve always known that worn-out quote from the Attorney General’s office about the principle of equality. I’d like someone to manage to explain to me, according to their approach, how such a possibility can exist: one group called Arabs has no sanctions whatsoever and can receive funding for studies and so on and so on, while another group called Haredim—everything is on the table against them, every possible kind of sanction. The elephant in the room is that because they’re unreliable and could turn on us, that’s a reason to grant them rights, a reason to place extra obligations on the others? How can such discrimination exist? Either everyone should get sanctions, and certainly not money for studies, or everyone should get an exemption. What’s needed here is either some super-learned distinction that my mind can’t grasp, or a crooked distinction bent like a sickle.
Answer
I don’t have information about the Attorney General’s position. There is no draft obligation for Arabs, and that makes a lot of sense. True, it would be proper to legislate that they be required to do national service. But in any case, that won’t help us with soldiers for our wars.
In any case, the Haredim need to enlist and get hit as hard as possible if they don’t do so. And the inequality regarding Arabs should be dealt with separately, independently.
Discussion on Answer
A classic Haredi argument: as long as there’s no equality, we should all commit suicide. For example, if an atom bomb were headed for the country and every citizen had to give one shekel to defend against it. There’s one group that doesn’t have a shekel, but it’s also not willing to water public flowerpots instead of giving a shekel. So you’re suggesting we not give the shekel and all die. Pure Haredi logic. If someone brought up such idiotic reasoning in yeshiva, they’d throw him straight into a Sephardi yeshiva (or an Arab one). But in the impossible apologetic attempt to defend a position that cannot be defended—there, anything goes. No matter how idiotic. Amazingly, in your opening question you were still talking about crooked arguments. You apparently really understand that field.
Good luck to us.
Is the response here from the Michi persona? Or Michi-bot? True, I’m an Arab, but don’t try to confuse me. I once heard in the village a saying from Rabbi Chaim of Brisk that crooked reasoning was created in order to judge people favorably. At least give a crooked argument. Don’t slander and don’t curse (in that, we’re better than you Jews), and don’t deflect the discussion with examples about flowerpots blooming up in the air. I didn’t ask whether, when one public is supposedly in the wrong, the second is also allowed to be in the wrong. I asked you a simple question: how, despite the principle of equality, is it possible to impose sanctions on one public, while another public—because it is dangerous to the public and therefore its status is much more severe and inferior than the first public—gets exempted from sanctions for that very reason, and the sinner comes out rewarded? How do the Jews say it? “The native is on the ground and the convert is in the highest heavens?”
I answered you that this indeed needs to be dealt with, but it is independent. And you challenged that, meaning you claim that the Haredim should be exempt as long as the Arabs are not drafted.
So go back to your village and learn reading comprehension (at least when you read your own words, it would be fitting for you to try to understand them). And by the way, Rabbi Chaim’s statement that you quoted is nonsense, as I explained in my article on Occam’s Razor. But there’s no need for it here, since you’re using a different kind of crooked reasoning, and everything works out fine even without his forced explanation.
I left Haredi society more than almost a generation ago with my wife, may she live a good long life, with my daughters and my son.
I felt that bad ideas and bad patterns of conduct were passing through that community.
I left for a community of servants of God instead of the Haredi world in which I was born and raised.
It was hard, but looking back it was worthwhile, both in this world and the next.
I saved my descendants from going down to the pit, in this world and the next.
Sometimes I’m shocked by the stupidity spreading through the community in which I was born and raised and in which most of my family remained.
May God have mercy.
A chapter of Psalms might help.
Maybe not according to Rabbi Michi’s approach, but when there is no other way, even Rabbi Michi agrees that that’s what people do.
Mercy…
Why should it be dealt with independently? That contradicts the principle of equality. There’s this thing the secular people invented, that you can’t discriminate, whether for the better or for the worse. You also left out the main point. National service isn’t acceptable to me either if you’re not giving Haredim a similar option to make do with national service.